It would be cathartic to hear Lance Armstrong admit to the mountain of falsehoods (pun completely intended) he created over the years, as a New York Times report indicates he might soon do.

It would be refreshing and fun to get salty about it, too. Whatever scorn, ridicule and retribution he gets from it, he deserves.

But why bother? Why waste good snark and valuable vengeance on someone so meaningless? The joy in these things comes from popping someone who is too inflated, cutting someone that got too big down to size.

Well, Lance Armstrong has been cut down to size. His balloon has popped. The biggest name in sports, so big he transcended sports and stood astride the world, is just an annoying gnat now. Swat him, and move on. He's no longer worth the aggravation.

Just as he puffed himself up, he shrank himself down. Revelation after revelation about who he truly is and what he truly did to those who dared stand up to him, all made clear one real truth. Lance Armstrong is small. He's a small man. He's the very definition of smallness in a human being.

He's no champion. He's no hero. He's no role model. He's no inspiration for genuinely suffering human beings who wrestle with mortality, pain, loss and the temptation to make wrong into right, to make the righteous end justify the dishonorable means.

Lance Armstrong is nothing more than a liar, a cheat, a thug, a bully. He draped himself in the American flag, adorned himself with the trappings of a great sportsman and posed as a general in the war against cancer.

To maintain that image, that façade, that phony veneer, he treated other human beings like garbage. He manipulated them, threatened them, insulted them, slandered them, misled them, wiped his feet all over them.

There's nothing big about that. That's small. Weak. Soft. And fake.

Do we respect and fear fake tough guys, studio gangsters, people who flex "popcorn muscles"? Not lately, we don't.

That goes no matter how many triumphant rides on national TV he has made through the streets of Paris, no matter how many clean urine tests he brags about, no matter how many hilarious movie cameos he makes (along with everything else, he's now ruined "Dodgeball"), and no matter how many yellow bracelets he sells.

Keep this in mind, all who are troubled by this in any way — those who feel betrayed, those who feel he did the right thing for the wrong reason, and those who feel he only did what the competition demanded he do (that is, the "everybody cheats" crowd): Armstrong is not what he presented himself to be. He fooled everybody. He played us.

Don't feel like a sap or a sucker because of it. Don't feel as if you have to keep inflating Lance to make yourself feel better about falling for his deluge of lies on top of lies. It happens. It hurts when it does, but it goes away, and every day we become one day wiser.

To his credit, he's as good at it as anyone ever has been. In that area, Lance Armstrong really is world-class.

At the same time, though, he's as common as they come.

His type aims high but also falls hard. The universe seeks its own level. When he was selling it and the whole world was buying it, he was higher than he should have been. Now, he's sinking lower than he normally would have.

So low, that he's reportedly making this act of contrition to get back into competition — that is, get back into the celebrity game. Discuss among yourselves, then, just how sincere he really is.

What he seems sincere about, once again, is getting over on everybody. He liked being the famous, beloved, rich Lance Armstrong, and being his ordinary, invisible, middle-of-the-pack self isn't good enough.

Just like being a perennial All-Star wasn't good enough for Barry Bonds, being a brittle slugger wasn't good enough for Mark McGwire, being a really fast sprinter wasn't good enough for Marion Jones.

Remember, McGwire and Jones admitted it, too. They said they were sorry. What were they sorry about? Getting busted. Losing their fraudulently earned fame and status. Being on the outside instead of on the inside.

Sound familiar? Except much bigger … or smaller?

Lance Armstrong, of course, should owe people money. He definitely owes certain people direct apologies. To the public, though, he owes nothing. We actually owe him.

We owe him the backs of our heads. We owe him our closed mouths and closed ears. We owe him our indifference and inattention to anything he says or does anymore.

Lance Armstrong isn't big anymore. He's small. So small, we can't even see him anymore.